What happened

On 31 August 2026, Taiwan’s Central News Agency (CNA) launched CNA MCP and opened it to subscribers at NT$200 a month.

MCP is a standard way for an AI assistant to connect straight to a database and look things up. Subscribers attach it to the assistant they already use — ChatGPT, Claude and the like — and from then on, when a question touches the news, the AI searches CNA’s archive in real time and is required to cite its source.

The archive holds nearly 5 million news stories going back more than 30 years, 3.5 million news photos spanning a century, world yearbook data from 2000 onward, and public data from about 150 Taiwanese government agencies. CNA says it is the first news organisation in Taiwan to give AI access to its reporting through MCP, and that anyone from government bodies and schools to individuals can subscribe.

As for why, CNA’s president framed it around “zero-click”: more and more people ask AI directly and never visit a website. The executive who led the project put it more starkly in an interview with the Taiwanese tech magazine Business Next: “Because the end of websites is coming.” He also admitted that nobody can guarantee MCP becomes the next main gateway.

Why it matters to you

What CNA has changed is how AI gets its material. When an AI answers a question about Taiwan, it has always assembled the answer from whatever it found on the open web — whichever version the crawler happened to pick up, from whichever year, and that’s what the answer reflects. Now an authoritative outlet has stopped waiting: once a user subscribes, it sends the version it reported and edited itself straight into the conversation, with the source printed on the answer.

That splits the channels feeding AI into two layers. On top, authoritative sources plug themselves in and charge users for it. Underneath sit public web pages, waiting for a crawler to come by at some point. Most Taiwanese brands keep their official information in that lower layer.

You can check this yourself. Open ChatGPT, ask what your company does and what’s new with it, and look at what it cites. Often it’s a news piece, a comparison site or a forum page, sometimes a story several years old — rarely the version on your own site. If someone with CNA MCP attached asks about you, and you’ve ever been in a CNA story, the AI may pull that story straight up and put it in the answer with a citation, whether it covered a product launch or a customer complaint.

Names are a subtler problem. The project lead also noted that AI sometimes picks up the translations of names used in mainland China; CNA MCP guards against that for its users, keeping answers closer to the terms and names people in Taiwan actually use. For subscribers, at least, names in the news now have CNA checking them. Nobody is checking how AI writes your brand name, your product names or your company history.

At NT$200 a month, and with users having to attach it themselves, this won’t be on everyone’s phone any time soon. The people likely to use it are the ones who look things up all day: researchers, teachers, public agencies. It reaches few people for now. What’s worth watching is the direction.

What to do about it

What lets CNA charge is that archive of more than 30 years of verified reporting, the kind of volume people will pay to plug into their AI. Nobody subscribes to a company website, so a brand has no use for an MCP of its own.

The work is in the lower layer: when the AI goes out and picks things up on its own, what it picks up should be your official version. That means company facts that read the same on your site, in press coverage and on third-party pages; one consistent way of writing your brand and product names in Traditional Chinese; and a site whose content crawlers can reach and actually make sense of.

The trouble is that the pages AI cites when it talks about you are mostly not yours. The news piece, the comparison site, the forum thread you saw when you checked earlier all belong to someone else, and you can’t change a word of them. What you can do is find out which pages the AI is citing right now, what each one says about you and which line contradicts your official account, then use your official version to fill the gaps and outweigh them. Until you have that list of sources, you can keep editing your site and still be patching places the AI isn’t even reading.

If you want to see which pages AI cites when it talks about you today, and what each one says, book a demo and we’ll ask a few questions live.

Further reading